With 40 million to 60 million Americans having swapped music files over the Internet, taking a few hundred of them to court as the Recording Industry Association of American did this week is, as the legal scholar Randal C. Picker has remarked, "a teaspoon solution to an ocean problem." For a few months after the lawsuits began last year, file sharing diminished, but it has now rebounded. If lawsuits aren't the answer to this problem, what is?

History may give us some guidance. After all, file sharing isn't the first new technology to have destabilized the entertainment industry. The way in which the industry responded to the introduction of three earlier inventions  radio, the VCR and Webcasting  offers important clues for music executives today.

In the 1920's, the advent of radio transformed the way most consumers gained access to musical "performances." Ascap, then a fledgling organization for composers and music publishers, initially allowed the infant radio stations to use its members' compositions without charge. When radio prospered, Ascap demanded compensation, but kept its fees low. The result was that radio continued to flourish, and the copyright owners enjoyed increasing incomes. By 1940, the broadcast industry earned gross revenues of $200 million, of which $4 million (2 percent) went to Ascap members. By 2000, Ascap and its sibling organizations were collecting approximately $300 million per year from American radio stations, roughly 3 percent of the stations' total revenues.

The film industry had its own challenge in the 1970's, when the development of VCR's allowed consumers to record television broadcasts. The major film studios feared that the new machines, by letting viewers skip advertisements, would end up hurting television networks and thus their licensing revenue. But the Supreme Court rejected the studios' claim that the manufacture and distribution of the devices constituted "contributory copyright infringement." Did the film industry collapse? On the contrary, it created a VCR- (and DVD-) dependent market of video sales and rentals, which today earns the studios approximately $10 billion a year.

Finally, in the mid-1990's, when Webcasters began "streaming" music over the Internet, they were compelled to pay fees to the owners of the copyrights of musical compositions, but not to the owners of the copyrights of sound recordings (that is, the record companies). Fearing that the new technology would erode CD sales, the record companies then persuaded Congress to give them a right to compensation from Webcasters.

But, in contrast to the modest compensation that Ascap got from radio more than a half-century earlier, the record companies got through arbitration rates that were so high that, within a year, the number of Webcasters had shrunk by about a third. The result has been to slow significantly the development of this industry  cutting into the fees that record companies could have collected.

It is noteworthy that the story with the happiest ending  both for the public and for the copyright owners  was the one in which the owners were denied any share in the revenues earned by the developers of the new technology but instead had to develop a new business model to take advantage of it (VCR's). The next best outcome occurred when the copyright owners first allowed the new technology to take root and then worked out an arrangement in which they obtained modest license fees (radio). The least satisfactory outcome occurred when copyright owners demanded fees that were so high they hurt the growth of the new technology (Webcasting).

If the pattern holds, then the record industry's response to file sharing  trying to block the technology altogether  would generate the worst of all possible results. To its credit, the industry has started to participate in paid music download services like iTunes, but a better solution would be to institute a monthly licensing fee paid by Internet users. History suggests that the record industry, and society at large, would be better off in the long run if it approached this new challenge with more open minds.====Source is Op-Ed for New York Times

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Those who say do not know.Those who know do not say.

it's never gonna happen. with how much money the entainment compaines make and with how few people would actually agree to a deal with them this i bound to be a very long battle. i'm know i'm not going top pay some off the wall monthly fee just to download 1 or 2 songs a month and i stopped buying cd's a long time ago when the record lables started being jerks over "we're lossing so much money. we can no longer buy the most expensive things in the world but now we can only get the 2nd most expensive things".

what history has shown us is that we have always bower down to the entertainment companies and taken it up the butt like pro's but we're tired of them living the high life at our expence. they have proved that they dont really care about us by the fact that they have sewed an 8 year old child and won. i do know it does cost money to make money but ya know what with how much some of those higher ups have they could support the industry even if as many people have stopped spending money on music as they say we have (which is total bullshit.... they're making more money off a new technology... like always as history has so nicely distated)

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*Hell hath no fury like a womens anger and damn be the fool who gets in her way*

A lot of artists swim in gold, and so do their kids. I believe, screw the rich, give to the poor, robin hood style if needed, and in the end we gotta get a balance. A balance of the world. No more 1rst 2nd or 3rd world countries. New world order not by force, but by union. I think though maybe fight club had that idea right:| being that a bunch of humans a stupid animals, even though were all inately good imo. Human kind, just needs some real bad help. Just as the earth does. Were screwin the earth that's for sure, the place we live, and need for life.

meh, file sharing is like one ice cube. I prefer the artists at http://www.deviantart.com more so then singing artists. It's nice to dance, and nice to listen. But it could be space harmonics, and fake voice for what anyone cares. Hollywood is just a shell, it could crumble, and life would go on. As would music, dance, partying, playing of beats, etc. I for one dislike that it hasn't crumbled already.

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"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!Beware the Jubjub bird, and shunThe frumious Bandersnatch!"